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Intermittent Corrupt Catalog Files with 7.7 latest update


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I cannot figure out what is going on here. I've been running 7.7 for a few months now and I get this problem even with the newest update.

It will be running fine for several weeks and then out of the blue it will corrupt several catalogs. I get the error Can't access Backup Set , error -1101 ( file/directory not found).

When I try to open the backup set it tells me the file cannot be found and I have to rebuild it. It happened again last night. Five corrupt backup sets out of 15. A record! I checked the logs for the night before. No problems. The backup server has not blue screened, or rebooted. In fact one thing 7.7 has been good for, for me anyway, is not crashing every few weeks. But it seems to have replaced that with corrupting catalogs. Catalogs are stored on a partition on a raid 5 configuration.

 

 

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The backup server has not blue screened, or rebooted. ... Catalogs are stored on a partition on a raid 5 configuration.

By chance has the backup server been shut down and then restarted?

 

Some RAID 5 cards are known to disconnect the drives from bus (even on graceful shutdown) before the RAID 5 cache has been flushed to the disk. It's really hard to find those difficult-to-reproduce errors. Been there, done that, with our RAID 5 card, which seems to have this firmware bug.

 

You might try Google to see some of the RAID 5 issues that are being seen. It may just be that Retrospect is acting as the canary in the coal mine.

 

One way to see if this is the problem would be to run with the RAID 5 write caches disabled, or with the catalogs stored on a volume that is not RAID 5 (or at least not on this RAID 5 that is showing the problems). Our RAID 5 card doesn't exhibit this problem (occasional corruption on graceful shutdown) only if the write caches are turned off.

 

Yes, it's possible that 7.7 has catalog corruption problems - it has other bugs - but make sure that it's not caused by the underlying hardware. Might be useful to post your hardware configuration, too, just in case others in the same situation can compare results.

 

Just a thought.

 

Russ

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